When it's a fledgling industry who successes or failures could have ramifications for years to come, and who has people actively trying to discredit, because it's success will damage their outdated business model, than yes, it's news.

I guarantee you that at least one modern generation Mustang has been destroyed in a garage fire. Heck, it might have even caused it (there are certainly ways for gasoline engines to catch on fire after they are parked), but it's not really news. You wouldn't have heard about it except maybe on page 37 of section D of the local paper where it goes "home damaged by fire" in the police report section.

Ford Motor Co. is recalling as many as 3.6 million cars, truck, and vans because a switch that deactivates the speed control can overheat and catch fire according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The agency warns in its recall notice that the switch problem can cause a fire under the hood.
The latest recall covers 16 brands of cars, sport utility vehicles and trucks from model years 1992 to 2004.
The models include the Ford Ranger, Ford Crown Victoria, Mercury Grand Marquis, Lincoln Town Car, Lincoln Mark VIII, Ford Taurus SHO, Mercury Capri, Ford Explorer, Mercury Mountaineer, Ford Explorer Sport and Explorer Sport Trac, Ford E-150-350, Ford E-450, Ford Bronco, Ford F-150 Lightning, some models of F-Series trucks and Ford F53 Motor Home chassis.

Ford Motor Co. is recalling as many as 3.6 million cars, truck, and vans because a switch that deactivates the speed control can overheat and catch fire according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The agency warns in its recall notice that the switch problem can cause a fire under the hood.

The latest recall covers 16 brands of cars, sport utility vehicles and trucks from model years 1992 to 2004.

They would not have recalled 3.4 million vehicles if none of them caught fire. Your contention is wrong. Teslas are receiving a disproportionate amount of coverage over this. This may be because they are electric, but claiming the coverage is not disproportionate is silly. We did not see weekly articles concerning every ford fire in 2007 but we get them for the Teslas.

Hmm, no articles about Fords catching fire, but they issued a recall just in case because the switches got hot.
Tesla ACTUALLY CATCHES FIRE, with no recall notice.
Elsewhere, a Fisher Karma ACTUALLY CATCHES FIRE, with no recall notice.
Sounds like the crow's on the other plate.

The fire authority didn't blame the car. Here's the quote from the article:

The Fire Authority, however, released a report stating that the fire occurred "as a result of an electrical failure in the charging system for an electric vehicle".

Fire broke out in the garage on the campus of the University of California-Irvine on November 15. The blaze was noted by the car's owner just before 3 am, and it was promptly extinguished by fire crews.

The incident caused up to $25,000 of damage, though the Model S itself sustained only light smoke damage. Nobody in the house was injured.

While the Fire Authority's report stated the most likely cause was a "high resistance connection at the wall socket or the Universal Mobile Connector from the Tesla charging system", Tesla says its own data shows the car was charging normally, with no fluctuations in the temperature and no malfunctions capable of causing a fire.

Tesla also notes that the car's charging cable was fine where it was connected to the car, and was damaged only on the wall side. This could suggest issues with the building's electrical supply, rather than with the vehicle.

This doesn't completely rule out the charging system. The fire was started between the wall socket and the charger.

This could suggest issues with the building's electrical supply, rather than with the vehicle.

The high resistance connection was most likely inside the wall socket, usually bad connections of the house wiring, or undersized wiring.This is very typical of aluminum wiring. Although the mainstream press won't report that even if it is discovered to be such.

It should be noted that aluminum wire is used constantly in homes in the USA right now. It is just limited to systems above 50A draw.

So your electric or induction stove. yea that is probably wired with aluminum. Your clothes dryer most likely not. The main supply lines for your home yep aluminum too. You have a sub panel, that is most likely being feed with aluminum. it wouldn't be hard to guess that the installer used aluminum even if the instructions say not to feed it with aluminum as I have seen t

If it's not safe for 20A house circuits (I know of many Aluminum Romex cables that have fried in-wall,) why in the world would it be considered safe for 50A or higher, unless the wire was incredibly thick?

"So your electric or induction stove. yea that is probably wired with aluminum."

So you are quoting Musk? Unlike Musk, the fire authority have no vested interest in the product and only want to describe what caused the fire. Musk is only looking at a log file while the fire authority were at the scene.

The article only reads that the log file on the Tesla S itself was read and showed the car charging normally. It does not mention any log data from the charger itself. The car could charge normally up to the point where the charger caught fire.

Logs tell a lot more than some volunteer fireman. Especially a fireman who can't determinewhich melted first, the connector or the wall outlet.(Not surprising since the field of fire investigation is full of voodo and disprove pseudo science.)

All that is know is where the fire started at the outlet.We know it wasn't a short circuit. Breakers would have tripped.We know it wasn't an arc, AFCI (required in garages) would have tripped.

Most likely cause is shade tree electrician swapping in a bigger breaker to

Yes, I've heard that Musk's hubris is very large (heh, heh, heh), but perhaps he does have a point. According to the article, all the damage was done at the wall connection (not the car connection), and a review of the car logs indicated that charging was proceeding normally at the time the fire started.

I'm going to make an assumption here that the tesla charger was probably safety tested[1] and approved for sale by UL, but what about the installation itself? Maybe California is different than the rest of North America, but most garages aren't natively wired with 240V sockets (quit laughing, you Europeans). So who did the 240V installation? The home owner or a certified electrician? Was it inspected? The article certainly doesn't say. Knowing how previous Tesla fire stories have been pounced on by the media, I'd probably do the same if I were in Elon's shoes and say the problem had nothing to do with the charger, and would change my tune later on if it turned out to be true. It wouldn't be the first time that crappy wiring has caused a house fire, and I don't think it's necessarily wrong for him to point this out.

[1] Not that safety testing means that a unit failure can't happen, but they do check (or should check, if they are doing their jobs right) that the design is robust to various abnormal conditions, and that fail-safes are built into the product to prevent fires or other dangerous conditions in the event of a malfunction. However, all the safety testing on earth won't save you from a shitty installation...

...UL is just a baseline safety test done against test units. It doesn't mean it's a robust design...

I work for a company that got UL approval for a device.

For our product, UL did look over our designs. They have some rules, for example, about how safety interlocks should be designed. You have to either use previously UL approved switches and sensors, or submit your sensors for approval. You cannot have software in the safety loop. Ex: You can't have software that monitors the voltage then sends a shut-off command to a relay. The sensor must be electronically connected to the shut-off. FPGAs are oka

Agree that there are lots of unknown. However, Musk has not given me a reason in past to believe that he talks out of his rear end.Between the fire department and Musk proposing conflict theories, I'll take Musk's side.

Where in the article did it say the car caught on fire? It sustained light smoke damage, and it appears that the fire happened at the wall, not at the Tesla side of things, indicating faulty house wiring to be highly likely. Also, take your FUD somewhere else, you shill. Gasoline cars have a worse record [torquenews.com] for fires per miles driven.

He cited figures from the National Fire Protection Association that 150,000 gasoline car fires occur per year. With 3 trillion miles driven per year, that works out to 1 vehicle fire for every 20 million miles driven. The record for the Tesla Model S so far is 1 vehicle fire per 100 million miles driven. This means gasoline car drivers are at five times greater risk to car fires than are Model S drivers.

1. Deny it all before the crazies run amok with unchallenged media coverage of the fire.2. If wrong, eh, it happens. Apologize, deliver an update, and good will. No one will hate him for it. Just business as usual.3. If he's right, or it's ambiguous as to what happened, he wins.

That should sum up the potential of whether it's likely the Tesla was faulted or not. Whether that's idle speculation or not at this point, the fact that the county appears ready to speculate with no confirmed facts is actually very concerning.

I personally believe that new electric cars are safer than petrol cars generally... they've got less to go wrong badly, and they've been proven.

However, a Nissan leaf gets 40mpg equivalent or so in the US (in terms of carbon emissions), according to here [shrinkthatfootprint.com] (see Emissions equivalent petrol car). A Tesla will get a lot worse.

That's shit. My parent's car will get almost 50mpg. It's a diesel. My car will get more than 30mpg, and it'll do 0-60 in 6.

I personally believe that new electric cars are safer than petrol cars generally... they've got less to go wrong badly, and they've been proven.

Well, they may have the potential to be. I would have to see some statistics. I found an equal number of stories of electrical car fires in houses as ICE car fires in houses, and we certainly have more ICE cars than electric cars.

When was the last time you changed the oil in your ceiling fan? Your blender? CD player?

Hell, when was the last time you "changed the oil" in the wheel bearings of your car?

Yes, all these things require lubricant, but they are not things we associate with having substantial oil reservoirs.

As for the the Tesla, yes it'll have wheel bearings and axels, so it'll probably have a bit of grease somewhere... but I don't believe it has a transmission. So there probably isn't anything that's we'd recognize as "oil"

Normally improper disposal of motor oil may make a fire situation worst, but doesn't, as far as I know, tend to cause them. Whereas, improper disposal of rags soaked in linseed oil (normally used in paints) has been the primary cause of a few fires.

A point the OP failed to grasp. The only oils that spontaneously burst into flame are natural oils that decompose. Motor oils certainly wont. The majority of first are caused by either space heaters or older electrical wiring with too high of a fuse/breaker on it. Who installed this guys charger? Himself? I can't imagine finding a breaker big enough for that charger is easy.

Not just this.1) The rag was left out in the sun.2) There's no temperature gauge, so you can't tell if it's 0F or 110F.3) There's some kind of unnatural glare going on. It could just be the rag is soaked with so much oil that it's outright reflecting the sunlight, but not knowing how the rag was prepared, I wonder if there's something say, concentrating the sunlight.

While spontaneous combustion is pretty cool to see, the reliabilty of this video is questionable.

That video isn't a very good example. He keeps moving the camera around, and it seems whenever it moves back out so you can see the whole rag pile, it appears to have been disturbed while it was not visible.

If there had been no tesla, would there have been a fire ? The Tesla might have caused the failed electrical installation to burn by taking more current than it was able to provide for a longer time than anything else in that garage, if it wasn't wired correctly.. So yeah, the Tesla showed the failure point, but I wouldn't beat tesla for it:)

Even if it is the charger it may be the wiring not the device itself. A friend had an attic fire that was caused by a hallway smoke detector (AC powered) of all things. The fire investigator determined the smoke detector was wired incorrectly.

It may be terminology missing; In actual fact all the charging equipment is onboard the car, but the fire officials may be referring the the exterior power cable as "the charger" especially if it's Tesla's High Power Wall Connector. The abbreviation for that, HPWC, could reasonably be assumed to mean High Power Wall Charger.

Personally I never let electricity be used unless it is under my direct supervision. Whenever I run the A/C, I go outside and watch the compressor unit until it has cooled the house down. Likewise, whenever I need hot water I go out in the garage, manually turn the water heater on, and wait until the water is completely heated. I throw the main breaker and remove the power meter from the side of the house every time before going to work, the store, etc.

Try that in Mass and you might wind up getting arrested. By law, you have to stand there, holding the pump handle, and can't stuff something in there to keep it pumping. A small minority of gas stations still have those metal clips to let you do it, and some people stuff other things in there anyway, but it is in violation of the law to do it that way.

If the cable was damaged at the wall side but not the car side, my immediate thought is a problem in the wall socket or wiring. I've run into that with regular outlets, old hardware causes high resistance and a very hot outlet and plug (thermal conduction through the metal parts). The most common cause is age causing corrosion of the connection plates inside the socket or looseness of the plates so the prongs of the plug don't make good tight contact with them. Either way it raises the resistance of the connection inside the socket and creates a lot of heat (it's doing exactly what the heating elements on an electric stove do). My fix is to open up the outlet and replace the socket with a new one, cleaning up and tightening the wires in the process.

The #2 problem is the actual in-wall wiring being old and just not up to gauge for the current draw of modern electronics. In 1970 we didn't have home computers and Xboxes and the like, 14-gauge wiring was common and hooking up a modern home-entertainment center and computer would have the wiring in the wall hot to the touch. Plug a Tesla into older wiring like that and you've got a fire waiting to happen.

That's in open air [powerstream.com], where each strand of conductor has proper cooling. Wiring for power transmission, you only want to shove around 5.9A through 14AWG. For 15A, you'd want at least 10AWG and more likely 9AWG to give you a safety factor. Yes, this is by rule of thumb, and doesn't take into account the length (increasing length increases resistance) , type of insulation, etc., but do you really want to take the cheapest possible approach when it can potentially burn your house down?

The Maximum Amps for Power Transmission uses the 700 circular mils per amp rule, which is very very conservative. The Maximum Amps for Chassis Wiring is also a conservative rating, but is meant for wiring in air, and not in a bundle.

NEC says that for continuous loads, you can pull up to 80% of the circuit's rating. Charging an EV qualifies as a continuous load. Below is a list of common copper wire sizes found in your typical home and it's 100% / 80% ampacity (assuming 60C rated insulation which is most common):

A war over public opinion. I don't know why the struggling U.S. automakers have not embraced electric vehicles. They will make a "zombie" truck [motorauthority.com] which everyone thinks is funny, but nobody actually wants. But tend to be disposed to doing everything in their power to resist that which is (probably) better for the environment and more efficient for a good portion of the population commuting just a few miles every day. Did they learn nothing from the Nissan Leaf sales?

Indeed, Tesla is fighting a war. That is when an obvious FUD attack is launched causing the stock to drop, I buy a few shares of TSLA. It's not a lot, but I'm helping screw over the shorters and the ICE/oil cartels.

FTA, the car owner said she set "the timer" to start charging at midnight. Where is this timer, in the car or on the charger connection? Maybe she is using one of those $4 light timers. Does anyone know if the Tesla can turn on its own charging system at some designated time? For that matter, how does the Tesla know what time it is? The fire department might be familiar with historic causes of fires, but (1) hardly any fireman knows anything about electricity as such, and (2) they could scarcely know a

"Fordâ(TM)s response to the fires â" first refusing to acknowledge that the switches posed a fire hazard, then conducting four recalls over seven years â" angered fire victims and consumer advocates. It does not hurt their cases t

The energy density [xtronics.com] of gasoline is higher. Additionally, though it's gasoline vapor that burns, any process producing a large volume of gas in a confined space can be considered explosive. The electric shock potential and dealing with lithium specifically seem to be more relevant concerns.

This doesn't make them fireproof, it makes them fire resistant, due to the high water content contained. This is the same concept as a "fireproof" safe, which is really only fire resistant. Once that water's gone, the temperature spikes rapidly by thermal conduction, even if the fire-resisting material itself doesn't burn directly.